Someone once said that semiotics explained something everyone knows in a language nobody understands. Something similar might be said of Kuklick’s book: It is patently obvious that in day-to-day politics and pop culture that the term fascism has a very loose meaning and is often just an insult. This is not a remarkable or penetrating observation. It is in fact, a very old one: it is essentially the same point that George Orwell made in 1944, albeit in a mercifully brief newspaper article rather than a book-length academic study:
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
Still, Orwell did not think the situation is entirely hopeless, and believed “underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning,” that it would be possible, one day perhaps, to specify some real content, but in the meantime one just had to use it with “certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
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